wisteria (like a photograph)

i am so tired
i can barely lift my arms

i struggle to carry myself
from one moment to the next

•

there are two photographs
of my mother lying in the sun
both dated JUL 71

she is so rail thin
i fear she could not stand
or lift a finger if needed

i am reminded of another photograph
of my sister and me on the floor
dated AUG 68

we are so rail thin
that my grandmother cried
when my mother showed her

•

we drive past a canopy of wisteria
in the early days of a pandemic spring

i am sure i know the word “wisteria”
because of my mother who loved purple

•

when i look at photographs now
there is a melancholia of recognition

everyone captured in these moments
wanted to live forever like a photograph

—P.L. Thomas

the consequences of gravity (one last flight)

i am losing track of time and space
and 3-D

i am flattening out
flattened

here and square on the floor
like a tile

i misread the consequences
of gravity

thinning out to almost nothing
fretting

please be careful where you step
and stand

i cannot bear the weight of you
on me

in this grave situation i did not expect
so soon

i have worried myself paper-thin
useless

we will not fill up and drift away
it seems

but wither to almost nothing
collapse

•

if you find the time
and me here on the floor

lift me gently before
folding me into a paper airplane

take me to the tallest building
to send me on one last flight

—P.L. Thomas

our personal pandemic

I hunger to commit the act of touch.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

we stopped shaking hands
we kept each other at arm’s length

we were so afraid of dying
we soon stopped living

we remembered each other’s finger tips
we dreamed about each other’s lips

no one was simply waving
everyone in fact was drowning

the shorelines left abandoned
beaches stretched like barren deserts

we stopped shaking hands
we kept each other at arm’s length

we were so afraid of dying
we soon stopped living

—P.L. Thomas

a theory of balloons

the little/ lame balloonman/ whistles
[in Just-], e.e. cummings

i.

you say “existential”
to my 5-year-old grand-daughter
talking about the homeless man
wearing camouflage
& sitting cross-legged
by the highway

ii.

while waiting on our pizza
the balloon woman
makes her a butterfly
with pink wings
a yellow body
& a Sharpie® smiley face

iii.

she wears the balloon butterfly
on her tiny child’s arm
sitting in her car seat
worrying about her brother
popping the balloon
when she gets home

iv.

i tell her balloons & butterflies
are both beautiful colorful
frail & certain to die
so we should enjoy them
while we have the chance
& not worry about that

v.

we try to soothe her
by saying we have pictures
of the butterfly balloon
that will last forever
but she says “except a video”
so you record her theory of balloons

vi.

balloons pop if there’s something spiky
then you cry & cry & then you get one later
i’ve got a balloon butterfly
& i’m never going to pop it
sometimes i’m going to pop it
& that’s okay i’m going to stop thinking about it

vii.

you tell her just to repress her feelings
& accept this is as part of life
that sometimes things break
just is what it is (we’re laughing)
no need to feel anything about it
& she says okay too seriously

viii.

she falls asleep as we drive
the balloon butterfly clinging
to her tiny child’s arm
too beautiful & terribly frail
i carry her in sleep-heavy in my arms
like a balloon or a butterfly

—P.L. Thomas

 

on turning 59, dementia, and social media

The day I die, the day I die
Where will we be?
“Day I Die,” The National

I want today to be far away already, far away like a runaway balloon
“Eleven,” Sandra Cisneros

after i shuffle off this mortal coil
after i no longer cling to this corporeal thing called My Life

if you still love me
if you can still love me

do not post pictures of my dementia on social media
do not there document that physical and mental decline

me crouched empty-eyed in the corner like a child
except for the face and clothes of an elderly man

please find something to remember
to share of the fleeting better me

if you can

or simply do nothing not even a zero
because i am no longer there or even any Me

the balloon has been set free from the string
rising finally and then completely out of sight

—P.L. Thomas

quotidian

i am the last person my father spoke to

my swollen father
wheel-chair bound
sitting beside my mother
stripped of speaking
by a stroke days earlier

his voice rough and faint
calling me by name
to take him to the bathroom
and explaining not a bedpan
in a simple request of his son

moments later on the toilet
surrounded by three nurses
my father there surrendered
despite the shared persistence
of his pacemaker and those women

we rushed my mother out
gathering in the hallway
trying to calm her solitary groaning
incomprehensible and terrified
like the muffled pleading from the room

people go to the bathroom and people die every second

—P.L. Thomas

i love a woman who swears

Your poetry’s bad and you blame the news

“Norman Fucking Rockwell,” Lana Del Ray

i love a woman who swears

xxxxxcussing often and beautifully
xxxxxas the sun and moon command the sky

xxxxxsinging along to songs that begin “goddamn”
xxxxxdropping a tune as offensive as the profanity

i love a woman who swears

xxxxxtelling me she’ll never leave me
xxxxxlike she is commanding me to go to hell

xxxxxcussing up a storm that ends in rainbows
xxxxxjust to ask me if i like her nails

i love a woman who swears

xxxxxtexting me what is this shit
xxxxxwhen i share a draft of this poem

xxxxxchallenging me ruthlessly along the way
xxxxxto saying she likes it and just kidding

—P.L. Thomas